238 religious revolution nowthem, we begin to create a form of experience and of belief that, by the
historical standard of the concept of religion, is neither unequivocally
religion or non- religion. So much the worse for our inherited catego-
ries, which we are condemned to stretch, bend, and reinvent for the
sake of what matters most. Th e religion of the future is, by dint of this
imperative, also the non- religion of the future.
To determine what qualifi es as revolution in religion, just as to settle
what counts as religion, we must begin with history. Th e orientations
that I previously examined— the dominant options in the spiritual his-
tory of civilization— have, I claim, a powerful element of shared vision,
despite the real and vast diff erences among them: the denial of sanctity
to nature with the consequent placement, at the center of religion, of a
dialectic between transcendence and immanence; the dismissal or de-
valuation, of the divisions within humanity, accompanied by ambigu-
ity as to whether this overturning of the walls need take place only in
our way of thinking and feeling or must also happen in the actual or ga-
ni za tion of social life; the replacement of the ethic of martial valor, and
of proud and vengeful self- assertion by an ethic of inclusive and disin-
terested altruism; the two- sided ticket to either escape the world or
change society; the disposition either to deny the unsurpassable limits
in the human condition— mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability— or
to provide us with some antidote or consolation for them; and the con-
sequent willingness to treat our susceptibility to belittlement as no
more and no less incurable than the other three defects in the human
condition.
A change in our spiritual life that breaks with any major aspect of
this inheritance is revolutionary. Th e revolution represented by the re-
ligion of the future begins, as my argument about its points of depar-
ture has suggested, in the ac cep tance of the terrible truth about our
condition; in the refusal to assimilate our corrigible susceptibility to
belittlement to the certainty of death and the fragility of our protections
against nihilism; in the determination to achieve for ourselves a greater
life, increasing our share in the power of transcendence that the salva-
tion religions attribute preeminently to God; and in the conviction that
we must change the world rather than simply describe it in diff erent
words.